Big tech, gay rights evolved together

No state let same-sex couples wed until 2004. The military kept its gays in the closet until 2011. And only last year did most Americans tell Gallup they support marriage equality — just in time for Wednesday’s much-anticipated Supreme Court rulings on the matter.

But Big Tech and gay rights have had a longer-term relationship — with huge benefits for both.

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Apple, for instance, sanctioned a gay employee group as far back as 1986. Lotus was the first publicly traded company to provide health benefits to the partners of gay employees. Fortunes made by the gay entrepreneurs behind Quark, GeoCities and WordPerfect bankrolled numerous lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy groups in their infancies.

The dramatic increase in acceptance of gay people over the past quarter-century has many causes, including the social impact of thousands of people coming out and pop culture’s attitude-changing embrace. Yet it’s also not a coincidence, experts say, that the meteoric trajectories of the LGBT movement and the tech industry occurred simultaneously.

“The general idea of corporate America taking on gay issues — with tech companies being out in front — has had an important influence on public opinion,” said law professor Gary Gates of the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the country’s top scholars on gay rights and demography. “They have been first movers on anti-discrimination, on relationship recognition and now on most of the transgender issues.”

The tech industry has been ahead of its time not just with its products but also in workplace norms. Apple, Lucent, Intel, Avaya and Xerox represented Big Tech well among the first 13 companies in 2002 to earn 100 percent ratings in the Human Rights Campaign’s first Corporate Equality Index, a scoring that examined employee benefits, corporate philanthropy and more.

“The first generation of tech companies — Microsoft, Apple and IBM — were some of the earliest adopters of LGBT benefits,” said Deena Fidas, deputy director of HRC’s Workplace Project. “And the second-generation companies — Google and Facebook — not only ensure equality internally, but they’ve turned around and spoken up for issues. For the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, for instance, we saw very strong leadership right out of the gate from the tech world.”

All of that, experts and advocates say, has helped bring LGBT people to this moment of anticipation and hope at the Supreme Court. The high court is expected Wednesday morning to rule on whether to invalidate Proposition 8, the 2008 California initiative that delegitimized same-sex marriage, and whether the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by Congress in 1996, is constitutional. DOMA prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages — even those now legally sanctioned in nine states and the District of Columbia.